Trouble, strife and sorrow come to them as they do to all, but there is a buoyancy and flexibility to the life celebrant, which enables her to deal with the pain without necessarily being submerged by it.

Living life as lila makes us aware of how important it is to include the concept of play in our lives. Life is not meant to be a grim plodding round of duties. It is meant to be joyous, exuberant, in the moment, says Suma Varughese

Life is lila…. As the festive season unfurls across the land, all of India stretches itself free of the monsoon somnolence and gleefully plunges into celebration. In a beautiful, dramatic flourish, the merry mood arches from Raksha-bandhan to Janmashtami to Ganesh Chaturthi and Durga Puja, before climaxing with Diwali. Lots of fun and games are had by everyone and I am sure you will come by your fair share; but what I shall address in this column is how we can annexe the festive mood into our system for keeps so that life itself becomes a celebration.

Living with vim and vigour: All of us know people who have embraced vibrance. They brim over with a joie de vivre. No matter what the circumstance or task ahead, they welcome it zestfully and pour themselves into it with so much enthusiasm, that they can make even cleaning a toilet seem like the best fun on earth (this would be particularly true of a Gandhian bon vivant - Gandhi was big on cleaning toilets.) Nor are they daunted when the dark times strike. Trouble, strife and sorrow come to them as they do to all, but there is a buoyancy and flexibility to the life celebrant, which enables her to deal with the pain without necessarily being submerged by it.

I still remember my aunt in Kerala mourning her daughter's death with full-throated weeping, but soon after, cuddling her granddaughter with love and tenderness. Her sorrow was not momentary. It was deep and sincere, but her very ability to get in touch with her feelings so fully made it possible for her to rise above them and not sink into depression or a stupor as many of us tend to when life sends us a rocket. When the sorrow strikes, she experiences it, and therefore it passes away.

Accessing emotions: The life celebrant fully understands one of the key secrets of right living, which is to be aware and open to feelings. Most of us tend to censor them, particularly negative ones. Therefore, we develop layers of resistance around them, preventing us from accessing emotions. If we continue with this long enough, our feelings will become low and muffled, and we will not be able to tune into them.

But ultimately, being able to celebrate life is an attitude, a perspective. And Indian philosophy has the answer to that. The ancients believed that the ground of all creation, Brahma, was 'One' to begin with. All of creation happened when, out of a sense of play, the One decided to become the Many. All of us are a product of the divine sense of fun or lila.

Taking life sportingly: Life as lila. How does that sound? And how does that change things? For one thing, it stops us from taking life too seriously. Creation is the lord's play in action, and, therefore, there is nothing so deadly serious about living. We don't need to take ourselves seriously, nor our travails and problems either. Seeing life as lila helps you to hold it lightly, not in a desperate life or death way.

If we can truly see the whole flow of life and all the circumstances that assail us as sport, then our attitude towards life will be very different. When troubles strike, we do not quiver and shiver. We take them sportingly, as an opportunity to improve our skills and resources. A job loss? Okay, here's a chance to really and truly experience insecurity and shortage of money and cope with both. A relationship gone sour? Now, there's an opportunity to introspect into your own behavioural patterns that came in the way of resolving the relationship. An illness? Life is giving you a corrective. When life is seen as a game, there's a grace and acceptance that clothes us, because we no longer identify with the outcome. Everything becomes fun, because everything has the potential to teach us something.

Carrying on, undaunted: Yes, sometimes we win and sometimes we lose the game. So, big deal. Like a good runner, we pick ourselves up from the ground, wipe the dust off our seats and carry on. We might even have a jaunty smile on our faces! Awareness of reincarnation and the concept of karma are two factors that also help us to see life as a game. If we have more than one lifetime, in fact hundreds of them, then we don't need to get frenetic about life. The fear that we have only one life to lead creates urgency and distorts our priorities and perspective. We pursue life feverishly, trying to get in as much as we can, like a child at a fair, unable to delve into its deeper purpose or to approach it with measured balance.

Trying out new ways of being: Focus on the long term: Reincarnation introduces the concept of eternity into our lives, and, with that, things naturally fall into place. We no longer focus on the short term, but the long term. We no longer try to fast forward our lives or force the pace of our growth. We have time to make mistakes, to try out new ways of being, to play!

Indian philosophy is quite clear about these concepts, and personally, I think they make enormous sense. Take karma, for instance. The law is very straightforward. We create all the circumstances of our lives by our thoughts, words and actions. Think of it. We are not helpless pawns in the hands of fate or luck. We make our own luck. We are the masters of our own fate. So, okay, we probably created plenty of bad karma for ourselves before we knew better, but with this knowledge under our belt, why not set out to make better luck?

Scripting a better life: Knowing this helps us to take control over our destiny and script out a better life. All the more reason then to live with the right attitude, with lila, in other words. Living life as lila also makes us aware of how important it is to include the concept of play in our lives. Life is not meant to be a grim plodding round of duties. It is meant to be joyous, exuberant, in the moment. We should never forget the importance of play, no matter how old we get. Why should we? Nor am I implying that we should live hedonistically, ignoring duty for pleasure. That won't help us grow spiritually at all. The option is to find the element of play in any duty and work.

It is this ability to find the sweet in the bitter that unlocks the stores of joy and happiness into our lives and enables us to live freely and unconditionally. In celebration mode for keeps.